The Project Gutenberg EBook of A history of art in ancient Egypt, Vol. I (of 2), by Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: A history of art in ancient Egypt, Vol. I (of 2) Author: Georges Perrot Charles Chipiez Translator: Sir Walter Armstrong Release Date: July 5, 2012 [EBook #40144] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT, VOL I *** Produced by Albert László, Matthew Wheaton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT. A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT FROM THE FRENCH OF GEORGES PERROT, PROFESSOR IN THE FACULTY OF LETTERS, PARIS; MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE AND CHARLES CHIPIEZ. ILLUSTRATED WITH FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY-EIGHT ENGRAVINGS IN THE TEXT, AND FOURTEEN STEEL AND COLOURED PLATES. IN TWO VOLUMES.—VOL. I. TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY WALTER ARMSTRONG, B. A., Oxon., AUTHOR OF "ALFRED STEVENS," ETC. London: CHAPMAN AND HALL, Limited. New York: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON. 1883. London: R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor, BREAD STREET HILL. PREFACE. M. Perrot's name as a classical scholar and archæologist, and M. Chipiez's as a penetrating critic of architecture, stand so high that any work from their pens is sure of a warm welcome from all students of the material remains of antiquity. These volumes are the first instalment of an undertaking which has for its aim the history and critical analysis of that great organic growth which, beginning with the Pharaohs and ending with the Roman Emperors, forms what is called Antique Art. The reception accorded to this instalment in its original form is sufficient proof that the eulogium prefixed to the German translation by an eminent living Egyptologist, Professor Georg Ebers, is well deserved; "The first section," he says, "of this work, is broad and comprehensive in conception, and delicate in execution; it treats Egyptian art in a fashion which has never previously been approached." In clothing it in a language which will, I hope, enable it to reach a still wider public, my one endeavour has been that it should lose as little as possible, either in substance or form. A certain amount of repetition is inevitable in a work of this kind when issued, as this was, in parts, and in one place[1] I have ventured to omit matter which had already been given at some length, but with that exception I have followed M. Perrot's words as closely as the difference of idiom would allow. Another kind of repetition, with which, perhaps, some readers may be inclined to quarrel, forced itself upon the author as the lesser of two evils. He was compelled either to sacrifice detail and precision in attempting to carry on at once the history of all the Egyptian arts and of their connection with the national religion and civilization, or to go back upon his footsteps now and again in tracing each art successively from its birth to its decay. The latter alternative was chosen as the only one consistent with the final aim of his work. Stated in a few words, that aim is to trace the course of the great plastic evolution which culminated in the age of Pericles and came to an end in that of Marcus Aurelius. That evolution forms a complete organic whole, with a birthday, a deathday, and an unbroken chain of cause and effect uniting the two. To objectors who may say that the art of India, of China, of Japan, should have been included in the scheme, it may be answered: this is the life, not of two, or three, but of one. M. Perrot has been careful, therefore, to discriminate between those characteristics of Egyptian art which may be referred either to the national beliefs and modes of thought, or to undeveloped material conditions, such as the want or superstitious disuse of iron, and those which, being determined by the very nature of the problems which art has to solve, formed a starting point for the arts of all later civilizations. By means of well-chosen examples he shows that the art of the Egyptians went through the same process of development as those of other and later nationalities, and that the real distinguishing characteristic of the sculptures and paintings of the Nile Valley was a continual tendency to simplification and generalization, arising partly from the habit of mind and hand created by the hieroglyphic writing, partly from the stubborn nature of the chief materials employed. To this characteristic he might, perhaps, have added another, which is sufficiently remarkable in an art which had at least v vi three thousand years of vitality, namely, its freedom from individual expression. The realism of the Egyptians was a broad realism. There is in it no sign of that research into detail which distinguishes most imitative art and is to be found even in that of their immediate successors; and yet, during all those long centuries of alternate renascence and decay, we find no vestige of an attempt to raise art above imitation. No suspicion of its expressive power seems to have dawned on the Egyptian mind, which, so far as the plastic arts were concerned, never produced anything that in the language of modern criticism could be called a creation. In this particular Egypt is more closely allied to those nations of the far east whose art does not come within the scope of M. Perrot's inquiry, than to the great civilizations which formed its own posterity. Before the late troubles intervened to draw attention of a different kind to the Nile Valley, the finding of a pit full of royal mummies and sepulchral objects in the western mountain at Thebes had occurred to give a fresh stimulus to the interest in Egyptian history, and to encourage those who were doing their best to lead England to take her proper share in the work of exploration. A short account of this discovery, which took place after M. Perrot's book was complete, and of some of the numerous art objects with which it has enriched the Boulak Museum, will be found in an Appendix to the second volume. My acknowledgments for generous assistance are due to Dr. Birch, Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, and Miss A. B. Edwards. W. A. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION i-lxi TO THE READER lxiii-lxiv CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION. § 1. Egypt's place in the History of the World 1-2 § 2. The Valley of the Nile and its Inhabitants 2-16 § 3. The Great Divisions of Egyptian History 16-21 § 4. The Constitution of Egyptian Society—Influence of that Constitution upon Monuments of Art 21-44 § 5. The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the Plastic Arts 44-69 § 6. That Egyptian Art did not escape the Law of Change, and that its History may therefore be written 70-89 § 7. Of the place held in this work by the Monuments of the Memphite Period, and of the Limits of our Inquiry 89-93 CHAPTER II. PRINCIPLES AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE. § 1. Method to be Employed by us in our Study of this Architecture 94-96 § 2. General Principles of Form 96-102 § 3. General Principles of Construction.—Materials 103-106 vii ix § 4. Dressed Construction 106-113 § 5. Compact Construction 113-114 § 6. Construction by Assemblage 114-119 § 7. Decoration 119-125 CHAPTER III. SEPULCHRAL ARCHITECTURE. § 1. The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its Influence upon their Sepulchral Architecture 126-163 § 2. The Tomb under the Ancient Empire 163-241 The Mastabas of the Necropolis of Memphis 165-189 The Pyramids 189-241 § 3. The Tomb under the Middle Empire 241-254 § 4. The Tomb under the New Empire 255-317 CHAPTER IV. THE SACRED ARCHITECTURE OF EGYPT. § 1. The Temple under the Ancient Empire 318-333 § 2. The Temple under the Middle Empire 333-335 § 3. The Temple under the New Empire 335-433 § 4. General Characteristics of the Egyptian Temple 434-444 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. COLOURED PLATES. To face page The Arab Chain, from near Keneh 102 The Pyramids, from old Cairo 102 Karnak, bas-reliefs in the Granite Chambers 124 Seti I., bas-relief at Abydos 126 General view of Karnak 360 Perspective view of the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak 368 Thebes, the plain, with the Colossi of Memnon 376 FIG. PAGE 1. During the Inundation of the Nile 3 2. Hoeing 4 3. Ploughing 4 4. Harvest scene 5 5. The Bastinado 6 6. Statue from the Ancient Empire 10 7. The Sheikh-el-Beled 11 8. Hunting in the Marshes 14 x xi 9. Shadouf 15 10. The White Crown 16 11. The Red Crown 16 12. The Pschent 16 13. Seti I. in his War-Chariot 23 14. Rameses II. in adoration before Seti 25 15. Homage to Amenophis III. 26 16. Construction of a Temple at Thebes 27 17. Columns in the Hypostyle Hall, Karnak 28 18, 19. Scribes registering the yield of the harvest 29 20. Colossi of Amenophis III. 30 30 21. Scribe registering merchandize 31 22. Boatmen 32 23. Cattle Drovers 33 24. Bakers 33 25. Women at a loom 34 26. Netting birds 35 27. Shepherds in the fields 36 28. Winnowing corn 36 29. Herdsmen 37 30. From the tomb of Menofre 39 31. Water Tournament 42 32. Mariette's House 43 33. Amenhotep, or Amenophis III., presented by Phré to Amen-Ra 45 34. Amen (or Ammon) 51 35. Ptah 52 36. Osiris 53 37. The goddess Bast 54 38. Painted bas-relief 58 39. Sekhet 59 40. Isis-Hathor 60 41. A Sphinx 61 42. Touaris 63 43. Rannu 64 44. Horus 65 45. Thoth 66 46. Sacrifice to Apis 67 47. Statue from the Ancient Empire 73 48. Woman kneading dough 74 49. The Scribe Chaphré 75 50. The Lady Naï 76 51. Ouah-ab-ra 79 52. Sculptor at work upon an arm 81 53. Sculptor carving a statue 83 54. Artist painting a statue 85 xii 55. Isis nursing Horus 87 56. Chephren 90 57. Ti, with his wife and son 91 58. Square building 97 59. Rectangular and oblong building 97 60. The Libyan chain, above the Necropolis of Thebes 98 61. General appearance of an Egyptian Temple 99 62. Temple of Khons, at Thebes 100 63. Temple of Khons, Thebes 100 64. Temple of Khons, Thebes 100 65. From the second court of Medinet-Abou, Thebes 101 66. Ramesseum, Thebes 101 67. The Egyptian Gorge or Cornice 102 68. Capital and Entablature of the Temple of the Deus Rediculus at Rome 104 69. The Egyptian "bond" 107 70. Double-faced wall 108 71, 72. Elements of the portico 108 73. Egyptian construction 109 74. Element of an off-set arch 111 75. Arrangement of the courses in an off-set arch 111 76. Off-set semicircular arch 111 77. Voussoir 112 78. Arrangement of voussoirs 112 79. Semicircular vault 112 80. Granaries, from a bas-relief 113 81. Modern pigeon house, Thebes 114 82. Elements of wooden construction 116 83. Wooden building (first system) 117 84. Wooden building (second system) 118 85. Seti I. striking prisoners of war with his mace 124 86. Stele of the eleventh dynasty 131 87. Mummy case from the eighteenth dynasty 137 88. Man and his wife in the style of the fifth dynasty 138 89. Sekhem-ka, his wife Ata, and his son Khnem, in the style of the fifth dynasty 139 90. Stele of Nefer-oun 140 91. Preparation of the victims and arrival of funeral gifts 141 92. Table for offerings 144 93. Another form of the table for offerings 144 94. Labourers heaping up ears of corn 146 95, 96. Sepulchral statuettes 147 97. Vignette from a Ritual upon papyrus 149 98. Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic emigrants 152 99. The tomb of Ti; women, representing the lands of the deceased, carrying the funeral gifts 154 100. Lid of the coffin of Entef 158 101, 102. Scarabs 159 xiii 103, 104. Funerary amulets 159 105. Pillow 160 106. Actual condition of a Mastaba. The Tomb of Sabou 167 107. Three mastabas at Gizeh 168 108. Restoration of part of the Necropolis of Gizeh 169 109. The Mastabat-el-Faraoun 170 110. Entrance to a Mastaba at Sakkarah 171 111. Lintel of the tomb of Teta 172 112. Plan of the tomb of Ti 174 113, 114. Mastaba at Sakkarah 174 115. Western wall in the chamber of the tomb of Ptah-Hotep 175 116. Plan of a Mastaba with four serdabs 178 117. Longitudinal section of the same Mastaba 178 118. Transverse section through the chamber 179 119. Transverse section through the serdabs 179 120. Figures in high relief, from a Mastaba at Gizeh 180 121. The upper chamber, well, and mummy-chamber 181 122. Double Mastaba at Gizeh 182 123. Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh 183 124. Details of the Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh 184 125. Bas-relief from Sakkarah 185 126. Head of a Mummy 188 127. Plans of the temples belonging to the Second and Third Pyramids 193 128. Plan of the Pyramid of Cheops 198 129. The Great Pyramid and the small pyramids at its foot 199 130. The Three Great Pyramids; from the south 201 131. The Pyramid of Illahoun, horizontal section in perspective 205 132. Section of the Pyramid of Cheops 206 133. The southern Pyramid of Dashour 207 134. Section of the Stepped Pyramid 207 135. The Stepped Pyramid 208 136-142. Successive states of a pyramid 209 143. Section of the Stepped Pyramid at Sakkarah 213 144. Construction of the Pyramid of Abousir in parallel layers 213 145. Partial section of the Stepped Pyramid 214 146. The Pyramid of Meidoum 215 147. The Mastabat-el-Faraoun 216 148. Funerary monument represented in the inscriptions 216 149. Plan and elevation of a pyramid at Meroe 219 150. Method of closing a gallery by a stone portcullis 220 151. Portcullis closed 220 152. Transverse section, in perspective, through the Sarcophagus-chamber and the discharging chambers of the Great Pyramid 221 153. Longitudinal section through the lower chambers 222 154. Pyramidion 230 155. The casing of the pyramids 233 xiv 156. Plan of the Pyramids of Gizeh and of that part of the Necropolis which immediately surrounds them 237 157. The Sphinx 238 158. Pyramid with its inclosure, Abousir 239 159. The river transport of the Mummy 243 160. Tomb at Abydos 244 161. Section of the above tomb 244 162. Tomb at Abydos 245 163. Section of the above tomb 245 164. Stele of the eleventh dynasty, Abydos 246 165. Stele of Pinahsi, priest of Ma; Abydos 247 166. Façade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan 250 167. Façade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan, showing some of the adjoining tombs 251 168. Interior of a tomb at Beni-Hassan 252 169. Plan of the above tomb 252 170. Chess players, Beni-Hassan 253 171. General plan of Thebes 257 172. Rameses III. conducting a religious procession, at Medinet-Abou 261 173. Rameses III. hunting 265 174. Rameses II. in battle 271 175. Painting in a royal tomb at Gournah 273 176. Amenophis III. presenting an offering to Amen 274 177. Flaying the funerary victim 275 178. Entrance to a royal tomb 277 179. Plan of the tomb of Rameses II. 282 180. Horizontal section of the same tomb 282 181. The smaller Sarcophagus-chamber in the tomb of Rameses VI. 283 182. Entrance to the tomb of Rameses III. 284 183. Hunting scene upon a tomb at Gournah 286 184. The weighing of actions 287 185. Anubis, in a funerary pavilion 288 186. Plan and section of a royal tomb 292 187, 188. Theban tombs from the bas-reliefs 294 189. Theban tomb from a bas-relief 295 190. A tomb of Apis 296 191. The tomb of Petamounoph 297 192. The most simple form of Theban tomb 299 193. Tomb as represented upon a bas-relief 299 194. Stele in the Boulak Museum, showing tombs with gardens about them 302 195. The sarcophagus of a royal scribe 303 196. Canopic vase of alabaster 305 197. View of the grand gallery in the Apis Mausoleum 306 198. Sepulchral chamber of an Apis bull 308 199. Section in perspective of "Campbell's tomb" 312 200. Vertical section in perspective of the Sarcophagus-chamber of the above tomb 312 xv 201. A Tomb on El-Assasif 313 202. The Temple of the Sphinx 324 203. Interior of the Temple of the Sphinx 325 204. The Temple of the Sphinx, the Sphinx, and the neighbouring parts of the Necropolis 331 205. Ram, or Kriosphinx 336 206. Gateway and boundary wall of a temple 339 207. Principal façade of the Temple of Luxor 345 208. The Temple of Khons; horizontal and vertical section showing the general arrangement of the temple 349 209. The Bari, or sacred boat 352 210. Portable tabernacle of painted wood 354 211. Granite tabernacle 355 212. General plan of the Great Temple at Karnak 358 213. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Luxor 361 214. Plan of the anterior portion of the Great Temple at Karnak 363 215. The Great Temple at Karnak; inner portion 367 216. Karnak as it is at present 369 217. Plan of the Temple of Luxor 371 218. Bird's-eye view of Luxor 373 219. Plan of the Ramesseum 377 220. The Ramesseum. Bird's-eye view of the general arrangement 379 221. General plan of the buildings at Medinet-Abou 381 222. Plan of the Temple of Thothmes 382 223. Plan of the Great Temple at Medinet-Abou 383 224. Plan of the Temple at Abydos 387 225. Seti, with the attributes of Osiris, between Amen, to whom he is paying homage, and Chnoum 390 226. Plan of the Temple of Gournah 392 227. Façade of the naos of the Temple of Gournah 393 228. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Gournah, from the portico of the naos to the back wall 393 229. Plan of the Temple of Elephantiné 396 230. View in perspective of the Temple of Elephantiné 397 231. Longitudinal section of the Temple of Elephantiné 398 232. Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia 401 233. Temple of Amenophis III. at Eilithyia; longitudinal section 403 234. The speos at Addeh 406 235. The speos at Addeh; longitudinal section 406 236. Plan of speos at Beit-el-Wali 407 237. Longitudinal section of the speos at Beit-el-Wali 407 238. Plan of the hemispeos of Gherf-Hossein 408 239. Gherf-Hossein; longitudinal section 409 240. Plan of the hemispeos of Derri 409 241. Longitudinal section; Derri 409 242. Façade of the smaller temple at Ipsamboul 411 243. Plan of the smaller temple 413 xvi 244. Perspective of the principal Chamber in the smaller temple 413 245. Longitudinal section of the smaller temple 413 246. Plan of the Great Temple 413 247. Perspective of the principal Hall in the Great Temple 414 248. Façade of the Great Temple at Ipsamboul 415 249. Longitudinal section of the Great Temple 417 250. Dayr-el-Bahari 419 251. Restoration in perspective of Dayr-el-Bahari 423 252. The ruins on the Island of Philæ 431 253. The battle against the Khetas, Luxor 436 254. Rameses II. returning in triumph from Syria 437 255. The goddess Anouké suckling Rameses II., Beit-el-Wali 441 INTRODUCTION. I. The successful interpretation of the ancient writings of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Persia, which has distinguished our times, makes it necessary that the history of antiquity should be rewritten. Documents that for thousands of years lay hidden beneath the soil, and inscriptions which, like those of Egypt and Persia, long offered themselves to the gaze of man merely to excite his impotent curiosity, have now been deciphered and made to render up their secrets for the guidance of the historian. By the help of those strings of hieroglyphs and of cuneiform characters, illustrated by paintings and sculptured reliefs, we are enabled to separate the truth from the falsehood, the chaff from the wheat, in the narratives of the Greek writers who busied themselves with those nations of Africa and Asia which preceded their own in the ways of civilization. Day by day, as new monuments have been discovered and more certain methods of reading their inscriptions elaborated, we have added to the knowledge left us by Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to our acquaintance with those empires on the Euphrates and the Nile which were already in old age when the Greeks were yet struggling to emerge from their primitive barbarism. Even in the cases of Greece and Rome, whose histories are supplied in their main lines by their classic writers, the study of hitherto neglected writings discloses many new and curious details. The energetic search for ancient inscriptions, and the scrupulous and ingenious interpretation of their meaning, which we have witnessed and are witnessing, have revealed to us many interesting facts of which no trace is to be found in Thucydides or Xenophon, in Livy or Tacitus; enabling us to enrich with more than one feature the picture of private and public life which they have handed down to us. In the effort to embrace the life of ancient times as a whole, many attempts have been made to fix the exact place in it occupied by art, but those attempts have never been absolutely successful, because the comprehension of works of art, of plastic creations in the widest significance of that word, demands an amount of special knowledge which the great majority of historians are without; art has a method and language of its own, which obliges those who wish to learn it thoroughly to cultivate their taste by frequenting the principal museums of Europe, by visiting distant regions at the cost of considerable trouble and expense, by perpetual reference to the great collections of engravings, photographs, and other reproductions which considerations of space and cost prevent the savant from possessing at home. More than one learned author has never visited Italy or Greece, or has found no time to examine their museums, each of which contains but a small portion of the accumulated remains of antique art. Some connoisseurs do not even live in a capital, but dwell far from those public libraries, which often contain valuable collections, and sometimes—when they are not packed away in cellars or at the binder's—allow them to be studied by the curious.[2] The study of art, difficult enough in itself, is thus rendered still more arduous by the obstacles which are thrown in its way. The difficulty of obtaining materials for self-improvement in this direction affords the true explanation of the absence, in modern histories of antiquity, of those laborious researches which have led to such great results since Winckelmann founded the science of archæology as we know it. To take the case of Greece, many learned writers have in our time attempted to retrace its complete history—England, Germany, and France have each contributed works which, by various merits, have conquered the favour of Europe. But of all these works the only one which betrays any deep study of Greek art, and treats it with taste and competence, is that of M. Ernest Curtius; as for Mr. Grote, he has neither a theoretic knowledge of art, nor a feeling for it. Here and there, indeed, where he cannot avoid it, he alludes to the question, but in the fewest and driest phrases possible. And yet Greece, without its architects, its sculptors, and its painters, without in fact its passion for beautiful form, a passion as warm and prolific as its love for poetry, is hardly Greece at all. i ii iii Much disappointment is thus prepared for those who, without the leisure to enter deeply into detail, wish to picture to themselves the various aspects of the ancient world. They are told of revolutions, of wars and conquests, of the succession of princes; the mechanism of political and civil institutions is explained to them; "literature," we are told, "is the expression of social life," and so the history of literature is written for us. All this is true enough, but there is another truth which seems to be always forgotten, that the art of a people is quite as clear an indication of their sentiments, tastes, and ideas, as their literature. But on this subject most historians say little, contenting themselves with the brief mention of certain works and proper names, and with the summary statement of a few general ideas which do not even possess the merit of precision. And where are we to find the information thus refused? Europe possesses several histories of Greek and Roman literature, written with great talent and eloquence, such as the work, unhappily left unfinished, of Ottfried Müller; there are, too, excellent manuals, rich in valuable facts, such as those of Bernhardy, Baehr, and Teuffel; but where is there, either in England, in France, or in Germany, a single work which retraces, in sufficient detail, the whole history of antique art, following it throughout its progress and into all its transformations, from its origin to its final decadence, down to the epoch when Christianity and the barbaric invasions put an end to the ancient forms of civilization and prepared for the birth of the modern world, for the evolution of a new society and of a new art? To this question our neighbours may reply that the Geschichte der bildenden Kunst of Carl Schnaase[3] does all that we ask. But that work has one great disadvantage for those who are not Germans. Its great bulk will almost certainly prevent its ever finding a translator, while it makes it very tedious reading to a foreigner. It must, besides, be very difficult, not to say impossible, for a single writer to treat with equal competence the arts of Asia, of Greece, and of Rome, of the Middle Ages and of modern times. As one might have expected, all the parts of such an extensive whole are by no means of equal value, and the chapters which treat of antique art are the least satisfactory. Of the eight volumes of which the work consists, two are devoted to ancient times, and, by general acknowledgment, they are not the two best. They were revised, indeed, for the second edition, by two colleagues whom Herr Schnaase called in to his assistance; oriental art by Carl von Lützow, and that of Greece and Rome by Carl Friedrichs. But the chapters in which Assyria, Chaldæa, Persia, Phœnicia, and Egypt are discussed are quite inadequate. No single question is exhaustively treated. Instead of well-considered personal views, we have vague guesses and explanations which do nothing to solve the many problems which perplex archæologists. The illustrations are not numerous enough to be useful, and, in most cases, they do not seem to have been taken from the objects themselves. Those which relate to architecture, especially, have been borrowed from other well known works, and furnish therefore no new elements for appreciation or discussion. Finally, the order adopted by the author is not easily understood. For reasons which have decided us to follow the same course, and which we will explain farther on, he takes no account of the extreme east, of China and Japan; but then, why begin with India, which had no relations with the peoples on the shores of the Mediterranean until a very late date, and, so far as art was concerned, rather came under their influence than brought them under its own? The fact is that Schnaase follows a geographical order, which is very confusing in its results. To give but one example of its absurdity, he speaks of the Phœnicians before he has said a word of Egypt; now, we all know that the art of Tyre and Sidon was but a late reflection from that of Egypt; the workshops of those two famous ports were mere factories of cheap Egyptian art objects for exportation. Again, the first part of Herr Schnaase's work is already seventeen years old, and how many important discoveries have taken place since 1865? Those of Cesnola and Schliemann, for instance, have revealed numberless points of contact and transmission between one phase of antique art and another, which were never thought of twenty years ago. The book therefore is not "down to date." With all the improvements which a new edition might introduce, that part of it which deals with antiquity can never be anything but an abridgment with the faults inherent in that kind of work. It could never have the amplitude of treatment or the originality which made Winckelmann's History of Art and Ottfried Müller's Manual of Artistic Archæology so successful in their day.[4] Winckelmann's History of Art among the Ancients, originally published in 1764, is one of those rare books which mark an epoch in the history of the human intellect. The German writer was the first to formulate the idea, now familiar enough to cultivated intelligences, that art springs up, flourishes, and decays, with the society to which it belongs; in a word, that it is possible to write its history.[5] This great savant, whose memory Germany holds in honour as the father of classic archæology, was not content with stating a principle: he followed it through to its consequences; he began by tracing the outlines of the science which he founded, and he never rested till he had filled them in. However, now that a century has passed away since it appeared, his great work, which even yet is never opened without a sentiment of respect, marks a date beyond which modern curiosity has long penetrated. Winckelmann's knowledge of Egyptian art was confined to the pasticcios of the Roman epoch, and to the figures which passed from the villa of Hadrian to the museum of Cardinal Albani. Chaldæa and Assyria, Persia and Phœnicia, had no existence for him; even Greece as a whole was not known to him. Her painted vases were still hidden in Etruscan and Campanian cemeteries; the few which had found their way to the light had not yet succeeded in drawing the attention of men who were preoccupied over more imposing manifestations of the Greek genius. Nearly all Winckelmann's attention was given to the works of the sculptors, upon which most of his comprehensive judgments were founded; and yet, even in regard to them, he was not well-informed. His opportunities of personal inspection were confined to the figures, mostly of unknown origin, which filled the Italian galleries. The great majority of these formed part of the crowd of copies which issued from the workshops of Greece, for some three centuries or more, to embellish the temples, the basilicas, and the public baths, the villas and the palaces of the masters of the world. In the very few instances in which they were either originals or iv v vi copies executed with sufficient care to be fair representations of the original, they never dated from an earlier epoch than that of Praxiteles, Scopas, and Lysippus. Phidias and Alcamenes, Pæonius and Polycletus, the great masters of the fifth century, were only known to the historian by the descriptions and allusions of the ancient authors. In such a case as this the clearest and most precise of verbal descriptions is of less value than any fragment of marble upon which the hand of the artist is still to be traced. Who would then have guessed that the following generation would have the opportunity of studying those splendid groups of decorative sculpture whose close relation to the architecture of certain famous temples has taught us so much? Who in those days dreamt of looking at, still less of drawing, the statues in the pediments and sculptured friezes of the Parthenon, of the Thesæum, of the temples at Ægina, at Phigalia, or at Olympia? Now if Winckelmann was ignorant of these, the real monuments of classic perfection, it follows that he was hardly competent to recognise and define true archaism or to distinguish the works of sculpture which bore the marks of the deliberate, eclectic, and over-polished taste of the critical epochs. He made the same mistake in speaking of architecture. It was always, or nearly always, by the edifices of Rome and Italy, by their arrangement and decoration, that he pretended to explain and judge the architecture of Greece. But Winckelmann rendered a great service to art by founding a method of study which was soon applied by Zoëga[6] and by Ennio Quirino Visconti,[7] to the description of the works which filled public and private galleries, or were being continually discovered by excavation. These two savants classified a vast quantity of facts; thanks to their incessant labours, the lines of the master's rough sketch were accented and corrected at more than one point; the divisions which he had introduced into his picture were marked with greater precision; the groups which he had begun to form were rendered more coherent and compact; their features became more precise, more distinct, and more expressive. This progress was continuous, but after the great wars of the Revolution and the Empire its march became much more rapid, and the long peace which saw the growth of so rich a harvest of talent, was also marked by a great increase in the energy with which all kinds of historical studies were prosecuted. But the widest, as well as the most sudden, enlargement of the horizon was due to a rapid succession of discoveries, some the result of persevering searches and lucky excavations, others rendered possible by feats of induction which almost amounted to genius. It seemed as though a curtain were drawn up, and, behind the rich and brilliant scenery of Græco-Roman civilization, the real ancient world, the world of the East, the father of religions and of useful inventions, of the alphabet and of the plastic arts, were suddenly revealed to us. The great work which was compiled by the savants who accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt first introduced the antiquities of that country to us, and not long afterwards Champollion discovered the key to the hieroglyphics, and thus enabled us to assign to the monuments of the country at least a relative date. A little later Layard and Botta freed Nineveh from the ruins of its own buildings, and again let in the light upon ancient Assyria. But yesterday we knew nothing beyond the names of its kings, and yet it sprang again to the day, its monuments in marvellous preservation, its history pictured by thousands of figures in relief and narrated by their accompanying inscriptions. These did not long keep their secrets to themselves, and their interpretation enables us to classify chronologically the works of architecture and sculpture which have been discovered. The information thus obtained was supplemented by careful exploration of the ruins in Babylonia, lower Chaldæa, and Susiana. These had been less tenderly treated by time and by man than the remains of Nineveh. The imposing ruins of the palace at Persepolis and of the tombs of the kings, had been known for nearly two centuries, but only by the inadequate descriptions and feeble drawings of early travellers. Ker-Porter, Texier, and Flandrin provided us with more accurate and comprehensive descriptions, and, thanks to their careful copies of the writings upon the walls of those buildings, and upon the inscribed stones of Persia and Media, Eugène Burnouf succeeded in reconstructing the alphabet of Darius and Xerxes. Thus, to the toils of artists and learned men, who examined the country from the mountains of Armenia to the low and marshy plains of Susiana, and from the deserts which border the Euphrates to the rocks of Media and Persia, and to the philologists who deciphered the texts and classified the monumental fragments which had travelled so far from the scene of their creation, we owe our power to describe, upon a sound basis and from authentic materials, the great civilisation which was developed in Western Asia, in the basin of the Persian Gulf. There were still many details which escaped us, but, through the shadows which every day helped to dissipate, the essential outlines and the leading masses began to be clearly distinguished, and the local distinctions which, in such a vast extent of country and so long a succession of empires, were caused by differences of race, of time, and of physical conditions, began to be appreciated. But, in spite of all these differences, the choice of expressive means and their employment, from Babylon to Nineveh, and from Nineveh to Susa and Persepolis, presented so many points of striking similarity as to prove that the various peoples represented by those famous capitals all sprang from the same original stock. The elements of writing and of the arts are in each case identical. The alphabets were all formed upon the same cuneiform principle, notwithstanding the variety in the languages which they served. In the plastic arts, although the plans of their buildings vary in obedience to the requirements of different materials, their sculpture always betrays the same way of looking at living forms, the same conventions and the same motives. Every work fashioned by the hand of man which has been discovered within the boundaries given above, displays community of style and unity of origin and tradition. vii viii ix The result of these searches and discoveries was to show clearly that this ancient civilisation had sprung from two original sources, the one in the valley of the Nile, the other in Chaldæa. The latter was the less ancient of the two, and was considerably nearer our own time than the epoch which witnessed the commencement of the long series of Egyptian dynasties by the reign of Menes. These two civilizations met and intermingled through the agency of the Phœnicians, and any active and prolific interchange of ideas and products began, traces of which are still to be found both in Egypt and Assyria. It still remained doubtful, and the doubt has but lately been removed, how the influence of these two great centres of cultivation was extended to the still barbarous tribes, the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, who inhabited the northern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. It is only within the last twenty years, since the mission of M. Renan, that Phœnicia has become well-known to us. Several English and French travellers, Hamilton, Fellows, Texier, among others, had already, in the first half of the century, described the curious monuments of Lydia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, and of the still more picturesque Lycia, whose spoils now enrich the British Museum; people vaguely conjectured that through those countries had progressed, stage by stage, from the east to the west, the forms and inventions of a system of civilization which had been elaborated in the distant Chaldæa. But it was not till 1861 that an expedition, inspired by the desire to clear up this very question, succeeded in demonstrating the rôle actually played by the peoples inhabiting the plateau of Asia Minor. As for Cyprus, it was but yesterday that the explorations of Lang and Cesnola revealed it to us, with its art half Egyptian and half Assyrian, and its cuneiform alphabet pressed into the service of a Greek dialect. These discoveries have put us on the alert. Not a year passes without some lucky "find," such as that of the Palæstrina treasure, in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, or that made by Salzmann at Rhodes. These pieces of good fortune allow the archæologist to supply, one by one, the missing links of the chain which attaches the arts of Greece and Italy to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and Assyria. While the remains of Oriental antiquity were being thus recovered piece by piece, secrets no less interesting and documents no less curious were continually coming to the surface to cast new light upon the history of classic antiquity. First came the marbles of the Parthenon, transferred by Lord Elgin to the British Museum in 1816. Both artists and connoisseurs, after a short pause of hesitation, agreed in asserting that the bas-reliefs of the frieze and the sculptures of the two pediments excelled anything which had previously entered into any European museum. Artists declared that they experienced a sense of beauty never felt before; they were face to face for the first time with the ideal of the Greeks, as it had been conceived and realised at that happy period of perfection which followed the disappearance of the last traces of archaic hardness. That period was but too short. It was comprised in a single generation, which was followed by one which made the first steps down the slope of the decadence. During a single lifetime a crowd of works were produced which, in spite of differences in material and subject, were all stamped with the same character of easy and frank nobility, of sincerity and elegant severity, of simplicity combined with grandeur. The death, or even the old age of the great men who had produced these works, was sufficient to lower the standard. Emphasis and a striving for effect took the place of nobility; under a pretence of sincerity, artists took to a servile imitation of nature, and mannerism, with all its weaknesses, began to disfigure their works. Art remained at a high level in Greece, however, longer than elsewhere. The word decadence can hardly be pronounced in connection with the admirable works produced in the fourth century before Christ, and yet it cannot be denied that, so long as we were without original examples from the great epoch of Pericles, we were without that most necessary material for a history of Greek art, a knowledge of the most masterly, the most pure, and the most elevated of her creations. The literary historian might as well have attempted to trace the course of her poetry without having read Sophocles, without having heard of the Electra or the Œdipus Rex. Attention being once turned in this direction, discoveries followed each other in rapid succession. The statues from the pediments at Ægina, so ably restored by Thorwaldsen, were bought to form the nucleus of the collection at Munich.[8] The study of these statues is very instructive in making clear to us the paths which sculptors had to follow in their progress from the stiffness and conventions of early periods to the ease and amplitude of classic perfection. As for the friezes from the temple of Apollo Epicurius, near Phigalia, they too are in the British Museum.[9] Thus brought into immediate propinquity with the marbles from the Parthenon, with which they are almost cotemporary, they afford us some curious information. They show us what the art of Phidias and Alcamenes became when those sculptors had to work in what we should call "the provinces;" how much they preserved and how much they lost of their complete excellence when employed upon buildings erected at less cost and with less care than those of the capital. So far as the composition is concerned, the consummate facility and the natural verve of the master who supplied the sketches and models is never absent, but the execution, which must have been left to local artists, betrays their inferiority by its inequalities and general weakness. The same may be said of the figures with which Alcamenes and Pæonius ornamented the pediments and metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Even before the discoveries at Ægina and Phigalia, the results of the French expedition to the Morea and the beautiful fragments of sculpture brought to the Louvre from the banks of the Alphæus, had given us reason to suspect this inferiority of provincial art, and the excavations recently undertaken by Germany, after an interval of about half a century of inaction, have finally removed all doubts. Neither the statues nor the bas-reliefs, nor any other part of the decoration of the temple at Olympia, possess the nobility and purity which distinguish the great buildings on the Athenian acropolis. They show abundant power and science, but also x xi xii perceptible inequalities, and certain signs of that exaggerated objectivity which we now call realism. Each fresh discovery helps us to comprehend, not without a certain sense of surprise, how much freedom and variety Greek art possessed during its best time. There is none of that dull uniformity which, with other races, distinguishes most of the works of a single epoch, none of the tyranny of a single master or school, none of the narrowness of mere formulæ. The memorable exploration to which we have alluded, and many others which it would take too long to enumerate, have not only made known to us the most original and most fertile period of Greek sculpture, but have given us much information as to that art which, when combined with the statues of Phidias and Alcamenes, reared those splendid creations which have been reconstructed with such skill and care by the artist and the archæologist; we mean Greek architecture at its best, the purest and the most complete architecture which the world has yet seen. Every year sees the excellent example set by Stuart and Revett,[10] in the second half of the eighteenth century, followed by an increasing number of imitators. The smallest remains of ancient architecture are measured and drawn with religious care; their arrangements are explained, their elements are grouped, their ensemble is restored with a comprehension of their artistic conditions which steadily gains in certainty and penetration. Blouet's interesting restorations of Olympia and Phigalia, published in the account of the French expedition to the Morea,[11] excited the emulation of the young architects at the French Academy in Rome, and opened to them a new course of study. Until then they had been contented with the monumental buildings of Rome and its neighbourhood, of Latium and Campania; a few of the more adventurous among them had penetrated as far as Pæstum; but it was not till 1845 that they ventured to cross the sea and to study the ruins of Greece and Athens;[12] in later years they have travelled as far as Syria and Asia Minor in search of objects for their pencils.[13] But the occupants of the Villa Medici were not alone in these researches. Doubtless, the invaluable publication which contains the results of their labours, forms the most ample and varied collection of documents open to the historian of architecture among the ancients. But many other architects of different nationalities have given their help to the work of patiently reconstructing the past.[14] Examined thus closely, and by the trained eyes of professional artists provided with all the necessary instruments, the relics of antiquity yielded up secrets which would never have been suspected by the casual observer. Thus Mr. Penrose discovered and explained that those walls of the Propylæum and of the Parthenon, which seemed straight to the eye, are in fact planned on a gentle curve;[15] he showed how this subtle variation was calculated to add to the beauty of the buildings, and to augment their effect. Hittorf arrived at still more important results through the minute examination of the Sicilian ruins. He was the first to describe the important part which painting played in the decoration of Greek architecture; he affirmed that in many parts of their buildings the stone or marble was painted over, and that the various members of the architecture were distinguished by differences of tint, which gave accent to the mouldings, and force to the figures in relief. These ideas were too strongly opposed to modern habits of thought to be received without strong protestations. Their partisans, too, did something to retard their acceptance by their absolute fashion of stating their convictions, and by certain unhappy applications of their system; but the polychromatic principles of the Greeks are now confirmed by too many facts to be denied.[16] Of the three principal branches of ancient art, that of which we know least is painting, properly speaking; the art of Polygnotus, of Zeuxis, and of Apelles. Of this we have but few remains, and we are obliged to take our ideas of its excellence from the descriptions of ancient authors. We have indeed the wall-paintings of those Campanian cities which were so long buried under the ashes of Vesuvius; paintings which were uncovered in great numbers under the Napoleonic domination, and have in later times been added to every year, in spite of the indolent fashion in which the excavations have been conducted. Fragmentary mural paintings of the same kind have also been discovered in Rome and in a few other neighbourhoods. But after all, great though the interest may be which attaches to these works, it must not be forgotten that they are Italian rather than Greek, that they are the decorations for the most part of small provincial cities, and that even the best of them, when compared with the productions of the fifth and fourth centuries before our era, are examples of decadence. At the most they enable us to recall, with some approach to probable truth, the taste and technical methods of the Alexandrian school.[17] Winckelmann and his immediate successors saw the ashes cleared from the first Pompeian wall-paintings. But they possessed no standards by which they could define the styles of those great schools of painting which flourished in Greece between the epoch of the Persian Wars and the beginning of the Macedonian supremacy; such a definition we may now however attempt with at least partial success. Since the time of Winckelmann hundreds and thousands of those painted vases of burnt clay, which the public persist in calling Etruscan, have been discovered, classified, described, and explained, in such a manner as to leave unsolved scarcely any of the problems upon which they could cast a light. Gerhard led the way in 1831 with his famous report on the Volscian vases;[18] numerous savants have followed his example, and nearly every day the series which they have established are enriched by new discoveries. These vases, as we now know, were made in many places, at Athens, at Corinth, in the Greek cities of Africa and of Magna Græcia. They were eagerly sought after by some of the races whom the Greeks considered barbarous, by the Græco-Scythians of the Crimea, as well as by the Sabellians and the Etruscans; the latter imitated them now and then more or less awkwardly, but it is unanimously acknowledged that...